


Talk Me Down

by SubjectB2



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: Depression, F/M, Nightmares, Past Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, alex karev being a good husband, alex tries his best, link is a good friend, unlike canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-11
Updated: 2020-08-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 10:54:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25848394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SubjectB2/pseuds/SubjectB2
Summary: That night she dreams in shades of blue. It's the lone coloured wall from her room in the facility, far nicer than the hospital's inpatient rooms.Jo has another depressive episode and Alex is a good husband.
Relationships: Alex Karev/Jo Wilson Karev, Atticus Lincoln & Jo Wilson Karev
Comments: 4
Kudos: 23





	Talk Me Down

**Author's Note:**

> This was a prompt on tumblr (kidneys4karev) and I just have to post it here.. for science.
> 
> TW - depression, past abuse

That night she dreams in shades of blue. It's the lone coloured wall from her room in the facility, far nicer than the hospital's inpatient rooms. Temporary holds didn't need pretty walls and  
children's stickers, or the soft toys Jo pinched between her hands to avoid the alternative of the target being her own arms. Temporary holds were just it- temporary, which couldn't be said for the facility, where the walls were blue or yellow or pink and abstract paintings started to move if you stared at them for too long. Where people were stuck, and Jo was stuck, 

But the facility was supposed to make people better, and for the most part, it had. Her meds had evened out, the ones she'd take in the morning with a blue Gatorade for the energy that sleeping five hours couldn't get her. Therapy helped too, as little as she wanted to admit it- Jo wasn't exactly the kind of person to ask for or even allude to needing help. She hadn't needed people before, and God, it had taken a lot of deprogramming to remind her that now she had a whole damn village.

She was getting better. Back at work, holding steady, Jo was getting better.

And yet when she wakes up from her dreams of faded blue walls and abstract paintings, Jo knows that it's back. 

There's a heaviness set deep in her bones, an aching that irradiating from everywhere and nowhere. It's a vice, her own ribcage a weapon turned against her, tightening around her lungs until she's suffocated slowly. Her own husband would later find her blue in bed if she couldn't draw in proper breaths, but Jo knows that's not the case, because the way she's drowning is nothing she can touch or stop or fix in the safety of the OR in her dark blue scrubs. It's a mental battle with physical symptoms and  _God_ **,** Jo's tired of it.

Really, Jo's just tired.

Her alarm rings throughout the loft, invasive and far too loud, each beep ringing in her ears. She lets it go on anyway, despite how grating the noise is to hear. 

One Minute. Two minutes. Three minutes.

No one comes to turn it off, so she concludes that Alex's out, at the store, getting coffee, sorting something out. Knowing him and Meredith, one of them's probably having some sort of crisis over an early bottle of tequila. Either she's having boyfriend troubles and called him, or he's having issues and called her. He probably had issues with her- maybe already knows what kind of day it is. What kind of week it is.

When the beeping becomes more unbearable than the act of moving to turn it off, she rolls over and shuts it down.

Hazily, she thinks the time reads 5:30.

-

This time she dreams in indigo, a darker colour than the facility walls, rather the blue that landed her there in the first place. Paul's face lurks in the shadows, and she's there too with her arms painted violet and blue and a nasty shade of yellow. Most of that time she's blocked out, violent memories stored at the back of her mind where she won't have to face them until her next therapy session. Still, that's years of moments she's been robbed of, negative ones or not- it's her life and her trauma and her brain denied her the right to see it.

Still, she remembers fragments last night. The murky in between where he'd take her out for dinner and grip her too tightly when she'd laugh at another man's jokes. It's moments like those, peaceful on the surface, threatening underneath, that are usually lost on her. It's the safety she felt buying her first ever house at 34 Cherry Lane, and the fear she felt the first night he turned her home into a crime scene.

She wakes from the indigo to Alex coming home, the usually faulty lock clicking behind him. He's seen her still in bed and she knows it, despite her closed eyes and quiet prayers that he'll leave her alone.

But, unfortunately, in Jo's opinion, Alex is a far better husband than that.

She can hear his footsteps slowly make their way over to her, stopping a few feet from the bed.

"Jo, it's nearly 7. C'mon." His voice is calm and steady, but Jo knows him far better than that to believe it. He's hoping she'll reply, a muttered 'five more minutes' or at least a pillow shucked at his face. He can only hope for that, laziness and sleepiness and mild irritation, because Alex knows what the alternative is.

She hums under her breath instead, something she hoped would somehow translate to 'leave me alone'. Judging by the silence, the abrupt halting of footsteps and all, Jo assumes that Alex got the message. He's seen this far too many times not to recognise it for what it is.

"Alright. You need anything?" Again, he's trying to sound casual, but it's all a poorly built facade. Alex worries, always has, always will, and it's evident by the sharp intake of breath. Despite that, she can't even bring herself to reply- luckily, her husband seemed to catch on.

"You want to talk about it?" He asks. Again, Jo doesn't respond.

"Do you want me to stay?"

Nothing.

He exhales slowly, likely nods to himself, knowing him, but she can't exactly confirm with her eyes closed. It doesn't matter anyway- she can't think about her husband's feelings without a pang of guilt, and she really can't deal with that on top of the fog.

“I’ll see you later. Call me if you need anything,” he adds, though he must know by now that it’s futile. She won't call and they both know it, but who would Alex be if he didn't try, right?

“I love you?” She knows what he’s doing, trying to provoke a response, but to her it sounded more like a question than a statement. Like he was asking if he loved her, doubting it at any sign of distress. Jo didn’t blame him- she wasn’t so fond of herself either.

It's only when the door clicks shut, cool breeze reaching Jo from the briefly open front door, that she distantly wishes she'd just spoken to him. About the facility walls and the paintings and the new memories of indigo and violet and unstable houses, but she didn't and she won't, no matter how much she knows it'll make things feel better. She doesn't tell Alex because the horrors of 34 Cherry Lane died with Paul, and Jo thinks that secrets are best kept behind blue lips.

-

He comes home early.

Time passes both agonisingly slowly and all at once in a state like hers, where the hours seem to drag on endlessly one moment, and yet the time between Alex leaving and returning seems painfully short. Disorientated, it isn’t until she sees the time that she realises he’s only been at the hospital for 13 hours, and that despite the occasional stumble to the bathroom, she’s been asleep for that long too.

Whatever- she closes her eyes and tries to fall back into her slumber, made impossible by the sound of Alex crashing about in the kitchen. Whatever he was doing, Jo didn’t know, nor care, just willing him to shut up or leave or cease to exist for a fleeting moment, just enough to return to somewhere where she doesn’t have to feel for a while.

She pulls the pillow over her ear and shoves her head into the mattress to block it out.

For the most part, it worked, though it was unclear whether the sound was properly muffled or just that Alex got the message. She didn’t know how much time had passed, but almost as quickly as she’d fallen asleep, her husband was shaking her awake again.

“You need to drink something,” he said, his voice soft, as it had been that morning. “You haven’t eaten or drank anything today, and you need your meds. C’mon.” His tone, though gentle, clearly left no room for arguments, one hand holding out a couple, small pills, the other with a plastic cup clutched in it. She exhaled slowly, propping herself up on an elbow, taking the pills from him. She washes them down with the milkshake, mildly dazed, nearly dropping the cup in the process. It’s good, something chocolatey, and it tastes damn better than the crap the hospital cafeteria offered. Still, she only drinks half of what Alex required, pushing it and him away simultaneously.   
  


“How’re you feeling?” He asked, clearly concerned.

Jo answered him by passing out.

-

He takes four days off of work, and though she didn’t ask him to, she knew there wasn’t any room for discussion. Part of her was glad for the company, relieved that she wouldn’t be as alone in that apartment as she felt, had someone to ground her, but mostly she was pissed off. His presence was testing her patience, despite knowing he meant well, only wanted to keep her safe and make sure that she was okay, so instead of snapping at him, she opted to ignore him. She fell into a routine in those days- wake up, stumble to the bathroom, take her meds, drink half a milkshake, sleep, repeat. He was stressed, she was tired, but it worked nonetheless.

When he has to go back to work, he sends Link, and God, she resents him for that even more. Link’s her best friend, but he doesn’t get this like Alex does, hasn’t seen her like this before. He tries his best, bless, makes stupid little comments about the TV or himself or Amelia or Alex, tries to make her smile, usually to no avail. Still, she lets him be, puts him through uncomfortably long silences that he no doubt hates more than she does, and likely scares him half to death when he finally goes home. Alex is at a loss and she knows it, but she can’t bring herself to care.

On day eight, Alex makes her crappy box macaroni, the stuff she practically lived on in high-school, still enjoyed far too much to be healthy. She manages the entire box, spread out over two sittings, making him reheat it the second time, and could’ve sworn that she’s never seen him look so happy over two dollar macaroni. The next day, she eats that and crappy takeout for dinner, watching old cartoons on the couch. On day ten, she doesn’t do any of it.

On day eleven, she watches Upstream Color on her TV just to have something to watch. She doesn’t half understand it, doubts she would on any other day, let alone one where her brain struggles to catch up to her feelings. Despite the confusion, she finds it pretty, albeit a little pointless- arctic blue seeps into her dreams, the colour of the hospital sheets that night her kidney nearly ruptures. It was starting to seem that every time Jo closed her eyes, she was back there, replaying one horrific night after the other, with her husband- her good husband, the one who would never lay a hand on her, she had to remind herself- unable to do more than watch helplessly. Despite that, she wakes on the couch to Alex’s indigo blanket draped over her and can’t help but crack the tiniest of smiles.

-

It takes one week, four days and twelve hours for Jo to recover enough to have a conversation with him. By this time, their blue, bruised eyes have faded slightly, back to their surgeon-standard tiredness. Alex, though worried, has learned to stop watching her all night, and Jo’s slept so much that she’s not quite sure she can physically sleep anymore.

That night she teeters between her world and his, curled up on the couch with her black and white cartoons looped on the TV. This time there’s no vodka in her system, and her laughter’s not wild enough to convince her best friend she’s manic or broken or lost, but it’s enough to draw him from the bed to the couch.

He’s looking down at her, wrapping in the indigo blanket she’d claimed as her own somewhere along the way. It was his, originally, something she’d clutched and wrapped around her for months now, insisting it was nicer than anything she owned, acting like it wasn’t the way it smelled just like him. Sometimes when he was away, or on long, drawn-out shifts, she’d wrap it around her shoulders and pretend like it was him, or on the nights where she missed him dearly, but couldn’t stand to accept his arms.

Tonight, it was just a comfort, something she’d just picked up out of habit. Come to think of it, she was pretty sure that Alex had left it on the couch for her, considering that definitely wasn’t where it had been that morning.

She glanced up at him, knowing he was hesitant to sit down, to bother her before she was ready, wondering whether to push her or leave her alone. She made the call, patting the couch beside her, moving over to make room for him to sit down. Instantly, she moved to the side, leaning against him until her head was on his lap, his hands finding their way to her hair. Slowly, without prompting, he started to braid her hair- she had no idea where that idea had come from, but it wasn’t as though she was going to stop him. It felt nice, despite that fact that her hair was probably gross and greasy from her severe lack of showers.

“You feeling any better?” He asked eventually, breaking their comfortable silence. He’d been itching to ask her, and she couldn’t exactly fault him for it, despite how much it irritated her. She hummed in response, eyes still trained on the TV.

“Yeah,” she breathed. She couldn’t see his face, but she knew he was smiling, brown, blue-circled eyes lighting up at the simple prospect of his wife getting better. 

“That’s good,” he replied, trying to sound encouraging. That too irritated the crap out of her, but God, she wasn’t going to ruin the mood now- ruin _his_ mood.

They lapsed into another silence, and despite that resolution, she couldn’t help but overthink. Should she be apologising? Her therapist has explicitly told her not to, that it was out of her control, something she couldn’t help and shouldn’t be held accountable for, but Jo wasn’t so sure about that. When delivering bad news, surgeons still apologised, were still held to a fault for not being about to save the life of whoever’s care they were charged with. This was still a drain on Alex’s life, whether it was down to her or not (which part of her was still convinced it was).

“I’m sorry,” she blurted out, eyes fixed straight ahead, scared to look behind her and make eye contact, “I know you didn’t sign up for this.”

“Jo, this is _exactly_ what I signed up for,” he insisted, his hair-braiding coming to an abrupt halt. “You said this might happen again, we knew that. I knew that. But when I married you, I made a vow. In sickness and in health. That hasn’t changed, Jo. It won’t change.”

She turned her head, eyes meeting with his. God, it was so obvious how tired he was, despite the improvement in sleep. Tired mentally, just like her- maybe not the way she was, but that didn’t change that fact that she’d been a shell of a person these past few days, and that had to have taken some sort of toll on him. However, she could also tell how Goddamn sincere he was- he meant every word he was saying, and that had never been more clear to her.

“For better or for worse,” she added quietly, the corners of her mouth turning up into the slightest of smiles. That set Alex off, who’s face morphed instantly from a frown to the brightest of grins. If Jo didn’t know any better, she’d have thought he’d received some sort of promotion, rather than a stupid smile, but of course, that didn’t matter to him. A victory was a victory, no matter how big or small it was.

“I love you,” he said, his voice soft in a way she knew was reserved for her and her alone. Even when they were just friends, best friends, the way he spoke and acted around her was always different than with everyone else, in a way that made her feel loved rather than lied to or singled out. For the first time a man knew how to love her, and how to show her that he loved her.

“I love you too,” she whispered. 


End file.
